Improve the detection of child abuse and neglect in cooperation with Augeo

Improve the detection of child abuse and neglect in cooperation with Augeo

Most child abuse and neglect (CAN) goes undetected. Up to 90% according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Moreover, most maltreatment still goes unreported. Even among those mandated to report. This often also includes medical staff in hospitals.

The good news is that training of professionals significantly contributes to better identification and reporting of child maltreatment. Moreover, experience from The Netherlands shows that by using information technology it is possible to effectively and successfully train large numbers of professionals in these topics online in a short period of time. In this country, hospitals became the number 1 CAN reporter within 10 years. How did all this happen? To begin with, Dutch hospitals started implementing screening procedures and the health inspectorate began to actively monitor the implementation of their child abuse policies. Moreover, training was implemented on a large scale. As a result, the share of medical staff that completed training on detecting CAN increased from approximately 10% to more than 75%.

Our non-profit foundation Augeo played a large role in this. The availability of our online courses made it possible to effectively and successfully train 160.000 Dutch professionals in health, social care and (pre)education within 10 years. This also includes medical staff in hospitals, such as doctors and nurses. Besides our introductory course on recognising and dealing with worrying situations in a child’s environment, our other courses for these professionals deal with specific topics. This for instance includes ‘communicating about violence’ and ‘the importance of medicine in evaluating child sexual abuse’. We wanted to ensure these online courses would reflect the real-life working situations of medical staff and make them accessible to large numbers of them. We therefore developed our courses in close collaboration with professional associations and other national and international partners, such as the government, knowledge institutes, and ISPCAN.

Our approach has proven to be successful. Nowadays, 90 % of all Dutch hospitals use our online courses. Moreover, using a randomised controlled methodology, the University Medical Centre Utrecht demonstrated the effectiveness of our medical courses. More specifically, according to an article in the Archives of Diseases in Childhood with an investment of 2 hours e-learning, performance in a simulated case regarding the recognition of child abuse was measurably improved in nurses working in an emergency department (Smeekens et al. 2013).

Augeo would like to enable other countries to benefit from our Dutch successful approach in order to enable professionals all over Europe to detect deal with potentially stressful and harmful situations in a child’s life. We are therefore now working on the international implementation of our 12 English online courses and e-lectures. For example, in close cooperation with the Kinderklinieken in der Weser Ems region in Germany, we made 5 of our online courses accessible for their staff and translated them into German. We would now like to introduce our international materials for medical staff together with partner organisations in other countries as well. Visit our website www.augeo.nl/en/memberships if you would like to learn more about these courses.

Promoting a safe and supportive environment for all children in Europe.

We would be interested in finding out from you:

if medical staff in hospitals in other European countries would be interested in working with our online courses

and if so, what would be the best way of working with you in introducing our online courses in outside The Netherlands in order to promote a safe and supportive environment for all children in Europe.

We are looking forward to hearing your views on this matter.

Andrea Smits

International project coordinator at Augeo

More information

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us:

Andrea Smits (info@augeo.nl); +31 (0) 343 53 60 40.

Augeo

Augeo is a private, not-for-profit foundation based in the Netherlands and was founded in 2007.

Our objective is to ensure that children can grow up healthy and safe without neglect, violence, abuse and other kinds of chronic ‘family stress’.

We aim to make it possible for everyone who works with parents and children to detect and deal with potentially stressful and harmful situations in a child’s life. Equally, we want families that are experiencing serious problems to get the right kind of support from the people around them. These core aims are at the very heart of our online training courses, our online journal and our innovative projects.